Do you want to speed up your Word­Press site?

Fast-load­ing pages improve the user expe­ri­ence, increase your pageviews, and can even help with your Word­Press SEO.

In this arti­cle, we will share the most use­ful Word­Press speed opti­miza­tion tips to boost Word­Press per­for­mance and speed up your website.

Unlike oth­er “X best Word­Press caching plu­g­in” lists or gener­ic “X tips to speed up Word­Press” tuto­ri­als, this arti­cle is a com­pre­hen­sive guide to Word­Press per­for­mance optimization.

We tried to cov­er every­thing from why speed is impor­tant to what slows down your Word­Press site and action­able steps that you can take to improve your Word­Press speed immediately.

To make it easy, we have cre­at­ed a table of con­tents to help you nav­i­gate through our ulti­mate guide to speed­ing up your Word­Press site.

Table of Contents

Basics of Word­Press Performance

• Why Speed Is Impor­tant for Your Word­Press Site
• How to Check Your Word­Press Web­site Speed
• What Slows Down Your Word­Press Website?
• Impor­tance of Good Word­Press Hosting

Speed­ing Up Word­Press in Easy Steps (No Coding)

• Install a Word­Press Caching Plugin
• Opti­mize Images for Speed

Word­Press Per­for­mance Opti­miza­tion Best Practices

• Keep Your Word­Press Site Updated
• Opti­mize Back­ground Processes
• Use Excerpts on Home­page and Archives
• Split Com­ments into Pages
• Use a Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work (CDN)
• Don’t Upload Audio or Video Files Direct­ly to WordPress
• Use a Theme Opti­mized for Speed
• Use Faster Plugins

Fine-Tun­ing Word­Press for Speed (Advanced)

• Split Long Posts into Pages
• Reduce Exter­nal HTTP Requests
• Reduce Data­base Calls
• Opti­mize Word­Press Database
• Lim­it Post Revisions
• Dis­able Hotlink­ing and Leech­ing of Your Content
• Use Lazy Load­ing if Needed
• Use DNS Lev­el Web­site Firewall
• Fix HTTPS/SSL Errors with­out Plugin
• Use the Lat­est PHP Version

Why Speed Is Important for Your WordPress Site

Stud­ies show that from 2000 to 2016, the aver­age human atten­tion span dropped from 12 sec­onds to 8 sec­onds. Today, it sits at around 8.25 sec­onds on average. 

What does this mean for you as a web­site owner?

It means that you have very lit­tle time to show users your con­tent and con­vince them to stay on your Word­Press web­site.

A slow web­site means users will poten­tial­ly leave your page before it even loads.

Accord­ing to a StrangeLoop case study that involved Ama­zon, Google, and oth­er larg­er sites, a 1 sec­ond delay in page load time can lead to a 7% loss in con­ver­sions, 11% few­er page views, and a 16% decrease in cus­tomer satisfaction.

On top of that, Google and oth­er search engines have already start­ed penal­iz­ing slow­er web­sites by push­ing them down in the search results, which means low­er traf­fic for slow websites.

To sum it all up, if you want more traf­fic, sub­scribers, and rev­enue from your web­site, then you must make your Word­Press web­site FAST!

How to Check Your WordPress Website Speed

Often begin­ners think that their web­site is OK just because it doesn’t feel slow on their com­put­er. That’s a HUGE mistake.

Since you fre­quent­ly vis­it your own web­site, mod­ern browsers like Chrome store your web­site in the cache and auto­mat­i­cal­ly prefetch it as soon as you start typ­ing an address. This makes your web­site load almost instantly.

How­ev­er, a nor­mal user who is vis­it­ing your web­site for the first time may not have the same expe­ri­ence. In fact, users in dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions will have a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent experience.

This is why we rec­om­mend that you test your web­site speed using a tool like IsItWP’s Word­Press speed test.

It is a free online tool that allows you to test your website’s speed.

For more rec­om­men­da­tions, you can see our guide on how to prop­er­ly run a web­site speed test.

After you run your web­site speed test, you might be won­der­ing what web­site speed you should aim for.

A good page load time is under 2 seconds.

How­ev­er, the faster you can make it, the bet­ter. A few mil­lisec­onds of improve­ments here and there can add up to shav­ing off half or even a full sec­ond from your load time.

What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?

Your speed test report will like­ly have mul­ti­ple rec­om­men­da­tions for improve­ment. How­ev­er, most of that is tech­ni­cal jar­gon that is hard for begin­ners to understand.

Learn­ing what slows down your web­site is the key to improv­ing per­for­mance and mak­ing smarter long-term decisions.

The pri­ma­ry caus­es for a slow Word­Press web­site are:

• Web Host­ing – When your web host­ing serv­er is not prop­er­ly con­fig­ured, it can hurt your web­site speed.
• Word­Press Con­fig­u­ra­tion – If your Word­Press site is not serv­ing cached pages, then it will over­load your serv­er and cause your web­site to be slow or crash entirely.
• Page Size – Pages load slow­ly if you use images that aren’t opti­mized for the web.
• Bad Plu­g­ins – If you are using a poor­ly cod­ed plu­g­in, then it can sig­nif­i­cant­ly slow down your website.
• Exter­nal scripts – Exter­nal scripts such as ads, font load­ers, and so on can also have a huge impact on your web­site performance.

Now that you know what slows down your Word­Press web­site, let’s take a look at how to speed up your Word­Press website.

Importance of Good WordPress Hosting

Your Word­Press host­ing ser­vice plays an impor­tant role in web­site per­for­mance. A good shared host­ing provider like Blue­host or Site­Ground takes extra mea­sures to opti­mize your web­site for performance.

How­ev­er, on shared host­ing, you share the serv­er resources with many oth­er cus­tomers. This means that if your neigh­bor­ing site gets a lot of traf­fic, then it can impact the entire serv­er per­for­mance, which, in turn, will slow down your website.

On the oth­er hand, using a man­aged Word­Press host­ing ser­vice gives you the most opti­mized serv­er con­fig­u­ra­tions to run Word­Press. Man­aged Word­Press host­ing com­pa­nies also offer auto­mat­ic back­ups, auto­mat­ic Word­Press updates, and more advanced secu­ri­ty con­fig­u­ra­tions to pro­tect your website.

We rec­om­mend WP Engine as our pre­ferred man­aged Word­Press host­ing provider. They are also the most pop­u­lar provider in the indus­try. (See our spe­cial WP Engine coupon.)

Speeding Up WordPress in a Few Easy Steps (No Coding)

We know that mak­ing changes to your web­site con­fig­u­ra­tion can be a ter­ri­fy­ing thought for begin­ners, espe­cial­ly if you are not a tech geek.

But don’t wor­ry, you are not alone. We have helped thou­sands of Word­Press users improve their Word­Press performance.

We will show you how you can speed up your Word­Press site with just a few clicks (no cod­ing required).

If you can point and click, then you can do this!

Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

Word­Press pages are dynam­ic. This means they are built on the fly every time some­one vis­its a post or page on your website.

To build your pages, Word­Press has to run a process to find the required infor­ma­tion, put it all togeth­er, and then dis­play it to your user.

This process involves a lot of steps, and it can real­ly slow down your web­site when you have mul­ti­ple peo­ple vis­it­ing it at once.

That’s why we rec­om­mend every Word­Press site use a caching plu­g­in. Caching can make your Word­Press site any­where from 2x to 5x faster.

Here’s how it works.

Instead of going through the whole page gen­er­a­tion process every time, your caching plu­g­in makes a copy of the page after the first load and then serves that cached ver­sion to every sub­se­quent user.

As you can see in the graph­ic above, when a user vis­its your Word­Press site, your serv­er retrieves infor­ma­tion from a MySQL data­base and your PHP files. It then puts it all togeth­er into HTML con­tent, which is served to the user.

It’s a long process, but you can skip a lot of it when you use caching instead.

There are a lot of good Word­Press caching plu­g­ins avail­able, but we rec­om­mend using either WP Rock­et (pre­mi­um) or WP Super Cache (free).

Check out our step-by-step guide on how to install and set up WP Super Cache on your Word­Press site. It’s not dif­fi­cult to set up, and your vis­i­tors will notice the difference.

Also, many Word­Press host­ing com­pa­nies like Blue­host and Site­Ground offer caching solutions.

Site­Ground SG Optimizer

If you are using Site­Ground, then your Word­Press site will come pre-installed with their SG Opti­miz­er. This plu­g­in has all the pow­er­ful fea­tures that you’d get with a pre­mi­um Word­Press caching plu­g­in like WP Rocket.

The best part is that it’s spe­cial­ly opti­mized for the Site­Ground Google Cloud servers to give you supe­ri­or per­for­mance results.

Aside from caching, you also get var­i­ous oth­er per­for­mance set­tings, WebP image con­ver­sion in Word­Press, data­base opti­miza­tion, CSS mini­fi­ca­tion, GZIP com­pres­sion, and more.

It also has dynam­ic caching fea­tures to help you speed up your eCom­merce web­site.

Blue­host Caching

If you are using Blue­host, then you can go to the Web­sites » Speed sec­tion to adjust your caching settings.

If you are using a man­aged Word­Press host­ing provider, then you don’t need a caching plu­g­in because it is built-in and turned on by default.

Optimize Images for Speed

Images bring life to your con­tent and help boost engage­ment. Researchers have found that using col­ored visu­als makes peo­ple 80% more like­ly to read your content.

How­ev­er, if your images aren’t opti­mized, then they could be hurt­ing more than help­ing. In fact, non-opti­mized images are one of the most com­mon speed issues that we see on begin­ner websites.

Before you upload a pho­to direct­ly from your phone or cam­era, we rec­om­mend that you use pho­to edit­ing soft­ware to opti­mize your images for the web.

In their orig­i­nal for­mats, these pho­tos can have huge file sizes. But based on the image file for­mat and the com­pres­sion you choose in your edit­ing soft­ware, you can decrease your image size by up to 5x.

At WPBe­gin­ner, we only use two image for­mats: JPEG and PNG.

Now you might be won­der­ing: what’s the difference?

Well, the PNG image for­mat is uncom­pressed. When you com­press an image it los­es some infor­ma­tion, so an uncom­pressed image will be high­er qual­i­ty with more detail. The down­side is that it’s a larg­er file size, so it takes longer to load.

JPEG, on the oth­er hand, is a com­pressed file for­mat that slight­ly reduces image qual­i­ty, but it’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er in size.

So how do we decide which image for­mat to choose?

• If our pho­to or image has a lot of dif­fer­ent col­ors, then we use JPEG.
• If it’s a sim­pler image or we need a trans­par­ent image, then we use PNG.

Below is a com­par­i­son chart of the file sizes achieved by dif­fer­ent com­pres­sion tools on one par­tic­u­lar image.

As you can see in the chart, the image for­mat you use can make a HUGE dif­fer­ence in file size, and this will affect your web­site performance.

For details on exact­ly how to opti­mize your images using Pho­to­shop and oth­er pop­u­lar edit­ing tools, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing qual­i­ty, see our step-by-step guide on how to opti­mize images for web per­for­mance with­out los­ing qual­i­ty.

WordPress Performance Optimization Best Practices

After installing a caching plu­g­in and opti­miz­ing your images, you’ll notice that your site will start load­ing a lot faster.

But if you real­ly want to keep your web­site as fast as pos­si­ble, then you’ll need to use the best prac­tices list­ed below.

These tips aren’t too tech­ni­cal, so you don’t need to know any code to imple­ment them. But using them will pre­vent com­mon prob­lems that will slow down your website.

Keep Your WordPress Site Updated

As a well-main­tained, open-source project, Word­Press is updat­ed fre­quent­ly. Each update will not only offer new fea­tures but it will also fix secu­ri­ty issues and bugs. Your Word­Press theme and plu­g­ins may have reg­u­lar updates, too.

As a web­site own­er, it’s your respon­si­bil­i­ty to keep your Word­Press site, theme, and plu­g­ins updat­ed to the lat­est ver­sions. Not doing so may make your site slow and unre­li­able, and make you vul­ner­a­ble to secu­ri­ty threats.

For more details on the impor­tance of updates, see our arti­cle on why you should always use the lat­est Word­Press ver­sion.

Optimize Background Processes

Back­ground process­es in Word­Press are sched­uled tasks that run in the back­ground of your Word­Press site. The fol­low­ing are some exam­ples of back­ground tasks that run on a Word­Press site:

• Word­Press back­up plu­g­in tasks
• Word­Press cron jobs to pub­lish sched­uled posts
• Word­Press cron jobs to check for updates
• Search engines and oth­er crawlers try­ing to fetch content

Tasks like cron jobs for sched­uled posts and updates have min­i­mal impact on web­site performance.

How­ev­er, oth­er back­ground process­es like back­up plu­g­ins and exces­sive crawl­ing by search engines can slow down a website.

You need to make sure that your Word­Press back­up plu­g­in only runs dur­ing low-traf­fic times on your web­site. You also need to adjust the fre­quen­cy of back­ups and data that needs to be backed up.

For exam­ple, if you are cre­at­ing a com­plete dai­ly back­up while you only pub­lish new con­tent twice a week, then you need to adjust that.

If you want more fre­quent back­ups such as real-time back­ups, then we rec­om­mend using a SaaS solu­tion like Blog­Vault so you are not tax­ing your server.

As for crawl­ing, you need to keep an eye on your crawl reports in the Google Search Con­sole. Fre­quent crawls that result in errors can cause your web­site to slow down or become unresponsive.

See our com­plete Google Search Con­sole guide to learn how to adjust the crawl rate.

Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives

By default, Word­Press dis­plays the full con­tent of each arti­cle on your home­page and archives. This means your home­page, cat­e­gories, tags, and oth­er archive pages will all load slower.

Anoth­er dis­ad­van­tage of show­ing full arti­cles on these pages is that users don’t feel the need to vis­it the actu­al arti­cle. This can reduce your pageviews and the time your users spend on your site.

In order to speed up your load­ing times for archive pages, you can set your site to dis­play excerpts instead of the full content.

You can nav­i­gate to Set­tings » Read­ing and select ‘Excerpt’ instead of ‘Full text’ next to the set­ting about what should be shown for each arti­cle in a feed.

For more details on the pros and cons of dis­play­ing sum­maries, see our arti­cle on full post vs sum­ma­ry (excerpt) in your Word­Press archive pages.

Split Comments Into Pages

Get­ting lots of com­ments on your blog posts? Con­grat­u­la­tions! That’s a great indi­ca­tor of an engaged audience.

But the down­side is that load­ing all those com­ments can impact your site’s speed.

Word­Press comes with a built-in solu­tion for that. Sim­ply go to Set­tings » Dis­cus­sion and check the box next to the ‘Break com­ments into pages’ option.

For more detailed instruc­tions, see our guide on how to pag­i­nate com­ments in Word­Press.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Remem­ber how we men­tioned above that users in dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions may expe­ri­ence dif­fer­ent load­ing times on your site?

That’s because the loca­tion of your web host­ing servers can have an impact on your site speed.

For exam­ple, let’s say your web host­ing com­pa­ny has its servers in the Unit­ed States. A vis­i­tor who is also in the Unit­ed States will gen­er­al­ly see faster load­ing times than a vis­i­tor in India.

Using a Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work (CDN) can help to speed up load­ing times for all of your visitors.

A CDN is a net­work made up of servers all around the world. Each serv­er will store sta­t­ic files used to make up your website.

These sta­t­ic files include unchang­ing files such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, unlike your Word­Press pages which are dynam­ic as explained above.

When you use a CDN, every time a user vis­its your web­site they are served those sta­t­ic files from whichev­er serv­er is clos­est to them. Your own web host­ing serv­er will also be faster since the CDN is doing a lot of the work.

You can see how it works in this infographic.

We rec­om­mend using Sucuri, Bun­ny CDN, or Cloud­flare (free).

A CDN works well with Word­Press web­sites and com­pli­ments your exist­ing Word­Press caching plu­g­ins for even faster load­ing times.

Don’t Upload Audio or Video Files Directly to WordPress

You can direct­ly upload audio and video files to your Word­Press site, and it will auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­play them in an HTML5 player…

But you should NEVER do that!

Host­ing audio and videos will cost you band­width. You could be charged over­age fees by your web host­ing com­pa­ny, or they may even shut down your site alto­geth­er, even if your plan includes ‘unlim­it­ed’ bandwidth.

Host­ing large media files also increas­es your back­up sizes tremen­dous­ly, and makes it dif­fi­cult for you to restore Word­Press from back­up.

Instead, you should use an audio and video host­ing ser­vice like YouTube, Vimeo, Dai­ly­Mo­tion, or Sound­Cloud, and let them take care of the hard work. They have the band­width for it!

Word­Press has a built-in video embed fea­ture, so you can copy and paste your video’s URL direct­ly into your post and it will embed automatically.

Find out more details on how it works in our guide on embed­ding videos in Word­Press.

If you are mak­ing a pod­cast web­site with Word­Press, then we rec­om­mend the pod­cast host­ing ser­vice Blu­br­ry for the best performance.

Use a Theme Optimized for Speed

When select­ing a theme for your web­site, it’s impor­tant to pay spe­cial atten­tion to speed opti­miza­tion. Some beau­ti­ful and impres­sive-look­ing themes are actu­al­ly poor­ly cod­ed and can slow your site way down.

It’s usu­al­ly bet­ter to go with a sim­pler theme than to choose a theme that’s bloat­ed with com­plex lay­outs, flashy ani­ma­tions, and oth­er unnec­es­sary fea­tures. You can always add those fea­tures using qual­i­ty Word­Press plugins.

Pre­mi­um Word­Press theme shops like Stu­dio­Press, Themi­fy, CSSIg­nit­er, and Astra offer themes that are well-cod­ed and opti­mized for speed. You can also check out our arti­cle on select­ing the per­fect Word­Press theme for advice on what to look for.

Before you acti­vate your new theme, see our guide on how to prop­er­ly switch your Word­Press theme for a smooth transition.

Use Faster Plugins

Poor­ly cod­ed Word­Press plu­g­ins often add a lot of bloat, whether your site actu­al­ly needs the plu­g­in or not. This increas­es your page load speed and slows down your site.

To help you choose the best plu­g­ins, we often pub­lish our expert picks of the best Word­Press plu­g­in show­cas­es. We pay spe­cial atten­tion to ease of use, user expe­ri­ence, and most impor­tant­ly performance.

The fol­low­ing are some of our top picks for the most com­mon Word­Press plu­g­in categories:

• WPForms – Fastest and most begin­ner-friend­ly con­tact form plu­g­in for WordPress.
• All in One SEO – Pow­er­ful Word­Press SEO plu­g­in that empha­sizes web­site per­for­mance to help you get high­er SEO rankings.
• Mon­sterIn­sights – Best Google Ana­lyt­ics plu­g­in for Word­Press that doesn’t slow down your site. It even includes options to load gtag.js local­ly to speed up your Google Core Web Vitals scores.
• Shared Counts – Many social media plu­g­ins load addi­tion­al scripts and not so grace­ful­ly. Shared Counts is one of the fastest social media plu­g­ins for WordPress.
• Seed­Prod – A drag & drop Word­Press land­ing page plu­g­in that helps you build blaz­ing-fast land­ing pages and even design an entire theme from scratch.

Apart from our own rec­om­men­da­tions, you also can run your own tests. Sim­ply run speed tests before and after installing a plu­g­in to com­pare its impact on performance.

For more details, see our guide on how to run a Word­Press speed test.

Fine-Tuning WordPress for Speed (Advanced)

By using the Word­Press opti­miza­tion best prac­tices and basic speed tips list­ed above, you should see a big improve­ment in your site’s load­ing times.

But every frac­tion of a sec­ond counts. If you want to get the very fastest speed pos­si­ble, then you’ll want to make a few more changes.

The fol­low­ing tips are a lit­tle more tech­ni­cal, with some requir­ing you to mod­i­fy your site files or have a basic under­stand­ing of PHP.

You’ll also want to make sure to back up your site first just in case.

Split Long Posts into Pages

Read­ers tend to love blog posts that are longer and more in-depth. Longer posts even often rank high­er in search engines.

But if you are pub­lish­ing long-form arti­cles with lots of images, then they could be hurt­ing your page load­ing times.

Instead, con­sid­er split­ting up your longer posts into mul­ti­ple pages.

Word­Press comes with built-in func­tion­al­i­ty to do that. Sim­ply add a Page Break block in your arti­cle where you want to start a new page.

For more detailed instruc­tions, see our tuto­r­i­al on post pag­i­na­tion – how to split Word­Press posts into mul­ti­ple pages.

Reduce External HTTP Requests

Many Word­Press plu­g­ins and themes load all kinds of files from oth­er web­sites. These files can include scripts, stylesheets, and images from exter­nal resources like Google, Face­book, ana­lyt­ics ser­vices, and so on.

It’s ok to use a few of these. Many of these files are opti­mized to load as quick­ly as pos­si­ble, so it’s faster than host­ing them on your own website.

But if your plu­g­ins are mak­ing a lot of these requests, then it could slow down your web­site significantly.

You can reduce all these exter­nal HTTP requests by dis­abling scripts and styles or merg­ing them into one file. Here’s a tuto­r­i­al on how to dis­able your plu­g­ins’ CSS files and JavaScript.

Reduce Database Calls

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there are a lot of poor­ly cod­ed Word­Press themes out there. They ignore Word­Press stan­dard prac­tices and end up mak­ing direct data­base calls, or too many unnec­es­sary requests to the database.

This can real­ly slow down your serv­er by giv­ing it too much work to do.

Even well-cod­ed themes can have code that makes data­base calls just to get your blog’s basic information.

In this exam­ple, every time you see <?php, that’s the start of a new data­base call:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="<?php language_attributes(); ?>">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>
charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

You can’t blame theme devel­op­ers for that. They sim­ply have no oth­er way to find out what lan­guage your site is in.

But if you are cus­tomiz­ing your site using a child theme, then you can replace these data­base calls with spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion instead. This will reduce all those data­base calls.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

You can review your par­ent theme for instances like this that can be eas­i­ly replaced with sta­t­ic information.

Optimize WordPress Database

After using Word­Press for a while, your data­base will have lots of infor­ma­tion that you prob­a­bly don’t need any­more. For improved per­for­mance, you can opti­mize your data­base to get rid of all that unnec­es­sary information.

This can be eas­i­ly man­aged with the WP-Sweep plu­g­in or the WP-Opti­mize plu­g­in. Both tools allow you to clean your Word­Press data­base by delet­ing things like trashed posts, revi­sions, unused tags, etc. These plu­g­ins will also opti­mize your database’s struc­ture with just a click.

See our guide on how to opti­mize your Word­Press data­base for improved performance.

Limit Post Revisions

Post revi­sions take up space in your Word­Press data­base. Some users believe that revi­sions can also affect some data­base queries run by plu­g­ins. If the plu­g­in doesn’t specif­i­cal­ly exclude post revi­sions, then it might slow down your site by search­ing through them unnecessarily.

You can eas­i­ly lim­it the num­ber of revi­sions Word­Press keeps for each arti­cle. Sim­ply add this line of code to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 4 );

This code will lim­it Word­Press to only save your last 4 revi­sions of each post or page, and dis­card old­er revi­sions automatically.

Disable Hotlinking and Leaching of Your Content

If you are cre­at­ing qual­i­ty con­tent on your Word­Press site, then the sad truth is that it will prob­a­bly get stolen soon­er or later.

One way this hap­pens is when oth­er web­sites serve your images direct­ly from their URLs on your web­site, instead of upload­ing them to their own servers. In effect, they are steal­ing your web host­ing band­width, and you don’t get any traf­fic to show for it.

Sim­ply add this code to your .htac­cess file to block the hotlink­ing of images from your site:

#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?wpbeginner.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteRule .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

Don’t for­get to change wpbeginner.com with your own domain.

You may also want to check our arti­cle show­ing how to pre­vent image theft in Word­Press.

Some con­tent scrap­ing web­sites auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate posts by steal­ing your con­tent from your RSS feed. You can check out our guide on pre­vent­ing blog con­tent scrap­ing in Word­Press for ways to deal with auto­mat­ed con­tent theft.

Use Lazy Loading if Needed

If you add many images, mul­ti­ple video embeds, and pho­to gal­leries to your blog posts, then your site can ben­e­fit from lazy loading.

Instead of load­ing all your images and videos at once, lazy load­ing down­loads only those that will be vis­i­ble on the user’s screen. It replaces all oth­er images and video embeds with a place­hold­er image.

As a user scrolls down, your web­site loads images that are now vis­i­ble in the browser’s view­ing area. You can lazy load images, videos, and even Word­Press com­ments and gravatars.

You can learn more in our guide on how to eas­i­ly lazy load images in Word­Press where we cov­er how to do this using the WP Rock­et and Opti­mole plugins.

For Word­Press com­ments, see our guide on how to lazy load com­ments in Word­Press.

Use DNS-Level Website Firewall

A Word­Press fire­wall plu­g­in helps you block brute force attacks, hack­ing attempts, and mal­ware. How­ev­er, not all fire­wall plu­g­ins are the same.

Some of them run on your web­site, which means attack­ers are already able to reach your web serv­er before they get blocked. This is still effec­tive for secu­ri­ty, but not opti­mal for performance.

This is why we rec­om­mend using a DNS-lev­el fire­wall like Cloud­flare or Sucuri. These fire­walls block mali­cious requests before they even reach your website.

Fix HTTPS/SSL Errors Without Plugin

If you are switch­ing your site to HTTPS/SSL, then it is like­ly that you may run across mixed con­tent errors.

The eas­i­est way to fix this is by installing a plu­g­in like Real­ly Sim­ple SSL. How­ev­er, the prob­lem is that this plu­g­in catch­es all URLs first, then changes them to HTTPS before send­ing them to the users’ browsers.

This has a small but notice­able per­for­mance impact. You can reduce this by man­u­al­ly fix­ing all URLs. For more details see our arti­cle on how to fix com­mon SSL issues in Word­Press.

Use the Latest PHP Version

Word­Press is main­ly writ­ten in the PHP pro­gram­ming lan­guage. It is a serv­er-side lan­guage, which means it is installed and runs on your host­ing server.

All good Word­Press host­ing com­pa­nies use the most sta­ble PHP ver­sion on their servers. How­ev­er, your host­ing com­pa­ny may be run­ning a slight­ly old­er PHP version.

The new­er PHP 8.3 is 42% faster than its pre­de­ces­sors. That’s a huge per­for­mance boost that your web­site must take advan­tage of.

You can see which PHP ver­sion your site is using by using the Ver­sion Info plugin.

Upon acti­va­tion, the plu­g­in will show your PHP ver­sion in the foot­er area of your Word­Press admin dashboard.

If your web­site is using a ver­sion low­er than PHP 7, then ask your host­ing provider to update it for you. If they are unable to do so, then it is time to find a new Word­Press host­ing com­pa­ny.

That’s it! We hope this arti­cle helped you learn how to improve Word­Press speed and performance.

Go ahead and try out these tech­niques. Don’t for­get to test your web­site speed before and after imple­ment­ing these best prac­tices. You’ll be sur­prised these changes will boost your Word­Press performance.

You may also want to see our ulti­mate Word­Press SEO guide to improve your SEO rank­ings, and our expert pick of the best busi­ness phone ser­vices for small businesses.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

The post The Ulti­mate Guide to Boost Word­Press Speed & Per­for­mance first appeared on WPBe­gin­ner.